International Lesbian Day: Honourable & Blessed Work

Ten years ago, I hadn’t quite got my head around the concept of lesbianism. 

Although my entire world was completely revolutionised when I accepted my attraction to women, I still wanted to keep the safety net of proximity to men, just in case. I wouldn’t learn about compulsory heterosexuality until my gender studies classes in undergrad. So I clung to the label of bisexuality a little longer and pretended I felt at home there.

At an all-girl’s school, the term “lesbian” was probably the worst thing you could be accused of. The word didn’t sit right in my mouth, and so when I finally gave up performing attraction to men and told people about my girlfriend, “gay” was the word I used to describe myself.

It was 2015: same-sex marriage had just become legal in the US, Clarke and Lexa from The 100 were in love and alive, and I cried every time I watched Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls music video. Maybe things were going to get better. After a lifetime of being the boring quiet girl at school, I suddenly became The Lesbian Girl, and I realised there was something satisfying about watching the people I hate look uncomfortable when they talked about me.

As I grew into my young adulthood, made my way through university, and got to be out in the real world with real queers, it became easier and easier to identify as a lesbian. It became something I associated with the feminist separatists of the 1980’s, and the cool, spoken word poets in their twenties at an open mic night. I began to discover lesbian music and film, read Audre Lorde and Leslie Feinberg and zines I found in the women’s room on campus. After only a handful of years of exposure therapy, I was able to find power in a word that had been levelled against me growing up. 

Now, in my mid-to-late-twenties, lesbianism has become so much more than just my sexuality. It’s my community, my politics, my job, my gender, my art. I’ve come so far from that teenager who still hid behind a feigned attraction to men. It feels as though I’ve been blessed by the gods of lesbianism, the deities of dykery, to lead a life where I can be unabashedly, explicitly, myself.

But times are changing. Countries are redefining what it means to be a woman to exclude trans people from legally identifying as such. Genocides are playing out in real time on our phones. It gets hotter and hotter every year, and our supposedly left wing governments still approve coal mines. Although it feels like I was able to settle into my identity in barely the blink of an eye, there’s every chance things could continue to swing right and I’ll speak about myself differently at 36. Who knows what could happen in our lifetimes? The freedoms and protections we have now are not a given, they were fought for over decades, and others are working just as hard to take them away.

This International Lesbian Day, I’m thinking about the opportunities I have as an angry, outspoken dyke, and how best to use them for the greater good. How this blessed thing, which is so much greater than any one of us, has informed the revolutionaries and changemakers of our history, and how best to honour them by following in their footsteps.

Being a lesbian is about so much more than who you fuck or fall in love with. It’s about your power, and what you use it for. Whose causes are you serving? Where is your time and energy going? How are you using the gift of lesbianism to make the world a fairer, more loving, and more just place? 

Investing in your community means investing in yourself.

The world is undoubtedly a better place for having lesbians in it, but our story does not start and end with us. Do not get complacent. There will always be more work to do, and it is the ultimate blessing to do it.